Friday, June 18, 2010

Facebook Posts to Appear in Real-Time Search Results

As of today, real-time results from millions of users’ Facebook posts will now appear in search results on OneRiot, one of the world’s leading real-time search engines.

These Facebook posts will also be accessible through OneRiot’s API, which powers more than 100 real-time apps around the web and on mobile devices.

OneRiot already pulls data from blogs, Twitter, Digg and millions of other sources all over the social web. Having access to Facebook’s nearly 500 million members, however, takes these search results to a higher plane by pooling a much larger dataset when finding and ranking links for search results.

Facebook data that will appear in OneRiot search results include publicly shared links on user profiles and publicly “liked” stories from all over the web. For example, a search for “World Cup” on OneRiot will reveal the most popular links about the soccer tournament being shared by Facebook users right now.

Of course, the availability of real-time results from Facebook is great for app developers. In a release this morning, OneRiot President Tobias Peggs said, “The addition of Facebook shares is an important update for the OneRiot API. To offer developers the best real-time search experience, we have to have the best understanding of what the whole social web cares about, right now. Facebook shares and likes give us key insights into what those things are.”

This news comes just a few days after Bing announced it would be serving Facebook and Twitter posts in search results, too. Google also added Facebook Pages to its real-time search offering in February this year.